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Terry Riley

Descending Moonshine Dervishes

Terry Riley's Descending Moonshine Dervishes was originally released in 1982. Recorded live in Berlin in 1975, and largely improvised, Riley plays a modified Yamaha organ with variable resistors to facilitate tuning in just intonation. This is a 50+ minute recording divided into two halves for vinyl. Terry Riley turned the music world upside down with his 1964 work In C, a revolutionary concept based on 53 modules that can be improvised upon by any number of musicians for an indeterminate amount of time over a pulsing C note typically played on piano or mallet. Performed live for the first time by Steve Reich, Pauline Oliveros, Morton Subotnik, and Jon Gibson, it has since been performed by everyone from the Shanghai Film Orchestra, Adrian Utley of Portishead, and the Malian musicians of Africa Express (featuring contributions by Brian Eno and Damon Albarn). Though referred to as the \"father of minimalism\", the 81-year-old Riley has ranged widely in the intervening decades, deeply influenced by jazz, North Indian classical music, and a distinctly West Coast strain of radical spirituality - and in turn influencing practically everyone: The Who (\"Baba O\'Riley\"), The Velvet Underground, collaborators The Kronos Quartet, as well as the legions of cutting-edge electronic musicians and contemporary composers making genre-defying music today. A resident of Grass Valley, CA, Riley is still touring the world.

Details
Cat. number: 11047-2
Notes:
Recorded in concert on September 27, 1974 during the Metamusik-Festival in Berlin. Other versions of this release show the date of recording as November 29, 1975 at the festival mentioned above. Internet sources indicate that there were two Metamusik-Festivals in Berlin, one in 1974 (at which Terry Riley performed, on Friday 27th September and Sunday 29th September) and a second in 1976. Thanks to Walter Bachauer, who curated the festival, are given on the back cover of the release. Printed in Germany.

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